Octopedia

In China, hundreds of thousands of students study abroad each year, and most consult agencies. Yet the status quo entails scraping through multiple levels of the internet, i.e., going to dozens of different sites and delving into levels of their subpages, which our founders along with the 100+ customers interviewed had a hard feeling with. The most widely used online solution, Baidu, with millions of annual searches, however, is filled with sponsored ads and out-dated info.

Our vision is to automate college counselling and our goal is to answer as many questions as possible for Chinese students, parents, and even college consultants themselves, or whoever interested in study abroad. To do so we seek to build a search engine with our own database incorporating resources from different sites, including but not limited to Quora, LinkedIn, Niche, Viewify, youvisit.com, college official websites, and Chinese blogs; and build a chatbot that retrieves such information for our user through an instant messaging interface.

While legal issues concerning data protection are still under the question, the underlying technology includes seach, data collection, database, natural language processing and a end product shell of web / iOS / Android / WeChat App, offering a complexity that might create technical barrier for our potential competitors. With a working prototype, we can reach our target users through media outlets such as CollegeDaily.Inc. (China’s No.1 Study Abroad online media platform, requires $5000) and Panopath (the go-to site for young Chinese studying abroad).

In terms of business model, we plan to explore different possibilties like transactional revenue model (direct charged App Download & In-App Purchase), subscription, ads or affiliate revenue model given an established user base.

For the past two years, our team has been developing the project on the side. Besides 2 hackathons, Octopedia attended MIT Launch 2017 Global Demo Day as a finalist; and on 2018.9, we joined CMU’s Project Olympus Program. Now Octopedia is involved in multiple competitions and looks forward to pushing the product out to the market and acquiring seed funding.